Is Danish more case-less than German? Pronominal case-form variation in coordinates and other syntactic environments
Jeffrey Parrott
University of Copenhagen
Abstract:
Variably mismatched pronominal case forms in Coordinate Phrases (CoPs) are highly salient among native speakers of English (attested specimens include Him and the zombie hunter are fighting, He thought I was coming between he and his wife, Him and I were working at the time, This is starting to make him and I both feel really bad). Pronominal case-form variation also occurs in other, less-salient syntactic environments, for example in post-copular nominals (attested specimens include It really is just him). Despite its harsh stigmatization by prescriptivists (e.g., O'Conner 1996, among many others), this kind of variation has attracted relatively little attention from sociolinguists (with the recent exception of Angermeyer and Singler 2003). Moreover, although the variation constitutes prima facie counter evidence to virtually all theories of abstract syntactic Case, thus posing a serious challenge to Minimalist theories of generalized uninterpretable feature checking (e.g., Chomsky 1995, et seq., Adger 2003), pronominal case-form mismatch has nonetheless remained at the margins of theoretical inquiry (e.g. Sobin 1994, 1997, Johannessen 1998, Lasnik and Sobin 2000).
Emonds (1986) observes that English differs from German in the "morphological transparency" of case. In German and other languages such as Icelandic, Greek, etc., distinctive case morphology appears on all open-class nominal Determiner Phrases (DP) (gender and person/number syncretisms notwithstanding). Emonds predicts that mismatched pronominal case forms, in CoPs or any other syntactic environment, will be completely unattested in such 'transparent-case' languages. However, in English and other languages such as Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Dutch, independent morpho-phonological changes erased case morphology on open-class DPs, leaving remnant case-like suppletive allomorphs within a closed subset of pronouns. Emonds predicts that pronominal case-form mismatches in CoPs and other syntactic environments will only be attested in such 'vestigial-case' languages.
McFadden (2004) argues that there is no 'abstract' or 'uninterpretable' Case in the syntax. Adopting the theory of Distributed Morphology (DM, Halle and Marantz 1993, Embick and Noyer 2007), nominal case morphology in transparent-case languages is determined in the post-syntactic morphological component by 'dissociated' feature assignment operations. McFadden provides a comprehensive dissociated case analysis of German, briefly reviewed here, but his theory does not explain pronominal allomorphy and variation in English. Parrott (2007: Chapter 6) takes McFadden's approach one step further by implementing and expanding Emonds's (1986) analysis within a DM framework. Vestigial-case languages like English do not provide sufficient evidence from which to acquire dissociated case assignment rules and Vocabulary such as those in German and other transparent-case languages. Thus, in order to acquire the complementary distribution of Subject Form (SF) and Object Form (OF) pronouns in English, the developing child must instead learn a very different set of Vocabulary items. The pronominal Vocabulary of English insert SF exponents (I, he, she, we, they) when a pronoun is the specifier of finite Tense (T), and elsewhere OF exponents (me, him, her, us, them) are inserted in all other environments. OFs are inserted by default in CoPs because pronouns inside a CoP are not in the specifier of finite T. However, certain SFs can occur inside CoPs only if the speaker has learned prestigious 'supplementary' Vocabulary items. For instance, the supplementary Vocabulary for 1sg pronouns insert the SF if the pronoun is right adjacent to and.
The cross-linguistic predictions made by this Emonds/DM analysis of pronominal case-form variation, noted above, appear at first glance to be confirmed for several languages. According to informants, this variation is totally unattested in German, Czech, and Greek. As demonstrated above, the variation is very well attested in English. According to informants, it is also attested in Norwegian and Danish. One grammar of Danish (Allan, Holmes and Lundskear-Nielsen 1995) gives the following example: [Min bror og mig / Mig og min brorer gode venner. Thus, my research project here at the LANCHART Center will explore Danish pronominal case-form variation in several dimensions. Our first step will be to evaluate Danish prescriptive and popular attitudes toward pronominal case-form variation. Next, we will undertake quantitative studies of the LANCHART corpus in order to address the following questions (at least): What is the range of attested mismatches? Are mismatches limited to CoPs, or do they occur in other syntactic environments like post copular nominals? Are prestigious 'hyper-correction' mismatches attested? Do such mismatches display conjunct-ordering asymmetries within CoPs, and for which persons and numbers? How are sociolinguistic attitudes reflected in variant usage, and what are the correlations between this variation and social factors? Is the variation stable in real and apparent time, or is there a change in progress? Some longer-term goals of the project will be to compare pronominal case-form variation across varieties of Mainland Scandinavian, English, and Dutch, and to examine the development of pronominal case forms in children using both corpora studies and experimental methods. This research project has broad implications for linguistics, including (but not limited to) the theoretical mechanisms of intra-speaker variation, the status of case in morphosyntactic theory, the typology, history, and analysis of case morphology in the Germanic language family, the acquisition of morphology, and the origins of new variants in language change.
Last Modified: April 1, 2008